Desiring Dragons
by Lirazel
Summary: “Dragons are fire and color and barelycontained power and ancientness and something else he can never put into words.” Charlie oneshot


Desiring Dragons

"Dragons are fire and color and barely-contained power and ancientness and something else he can never put into words." Charlie's relationship with dragons and with life. Oneshot

I've never written Charlie before, except for that one paragraph in "Seeing," so this is uncharted territory for me. But I love him now, and I feel that I've gotten to know him through this piece. I hope you enjoy.

_Disclaimer: I don't own it._

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"_I desired dragons with a profound desire." _

_J.R.R. Tolkien _

"_Arren did not speak, but he thought: I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning." _

_Ursula K. LeGuin_, The Farthest Shore

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I.

When you live your whole life in a world where there is magic all around, in everyday, little things, even the most monotonous and small, when magic is almost…commonplace, sometimes it doesn't seem like magic at all, but just The-Way-Things-Are. And you get used to that prickling feeling in the air till you almost don't notice the chills rising on your skin and you take for granted the overwhelming power a few simple words, correctly spoken, can have and you begin to think of magic only as another piece of homework to complete and knowledge to be memorized for a test.

And when something like that happens, sometimes a man must find enchantment elsewhere, must look for a substitute, must search for it with a drive that others find lunatic.

Charlie finds it in dragons.

Dragons are fire and color and barely-contained power and ancientness and…and something else he can never put into words, but he has never experienced it outside of dreams and dragons.

II.

There is a song Mum sings about dragons, a slow, sad song, as it has to be, the most melancholy lullaby he can imagine, but it is one of his first memories. A cold night, cocooned in sheets and quilts and comforters, the wind whistling by outside the windows, and Mum's not-beautiful but very warm voice singing him to sleep.

Years and years later, he sings it to his children, and thinks perhaps that it began there.

III.

He is five and Uncle Bilius comes to visit. This is exciting, for his dad's youngest brother seems very young and exciting and well-traveled—not boring like Dad, for many years pass before he realizes what a great man his father is, in his quiet way.

Offhandedly, at dinner one night, his uncle mentions the Dragonrider's Conference being held in Wales—he has friends who will be there, you know. He takes a bite of shepherd's pie—perhaps he'll pop down there tomorrow.

The words aren't even really out of Bilius's mouth before Charlie is shouting—can he go, too? After being yelled at by Mum that if he wakes up the twins, _he _has to take care of them, he turns his gaze to Uncle Bilius, who has finally stopped laughing enough to speak. Of course, it's up to Mum and Dad.

The next day, he is tripping along hand in hand with his uncle, filled to the brim with excitement and completely forgetting the long argument Mum and Dad had last night. Mum was dead set against it, convinced that he would be incinerated, but Dad insisted he could go. And now he is here, and he has drunk pumpkin juice and eaten too much treacle tart and Bilius says that soon they will see the dragons.

He becomes momentarily distracted by a boy about his age standing beside his father a few feet away. The boy makes an awful grimace and sticks out his tongue, and Charlie is about to pick up a rock to throw at him—the boy is a little older and bigger, but Charlie is thicker set and, after all, he's been fighting Bill since day one.

But then his uncle says his name. Quietly, but there is weight behind it. And Charlie looks up and suddenly the other boy is completely forgotten. The noise of the crowd gathered on the long plain fades from his ears, and he barely notices when Uncle Bilius picks him up and holds him against his shoulder.

Perhaps he is not too young to appreciate the grace, the undulating, serpentine motion of wings and long, lean body, winging toward him, emerald scales catching the morning sun and shining more beautifully than anything he could ever imagine. Dancing in the wind, free and complete and timeless.

He later remembers it as the most perfect moment in his life.

IV.

He gets in trouble for daydreaming during class, doodling pictures of dragons all over his note parchment and enchanting them to fly across the page. But the dance he coaxes from the ink is awkward and lilting and nothing at all like the powerful, frightening grace he saw all those years ago.

He has a pet snake that lives in the Astronomy Tower and he visits, sliding his fingers along the cool, smooth scales and wondering whether the dragons will feel anything like this.

He reads every book in the Magical Creatures section of the Library that contains any mention of dragons, memorizing whole passages till he can quote them from memory. His teachers are exasperated that he can spend so much time and energy on something so useless when his Potions grades are suffering and his History of Magic tests are atrocious. And when the time comes to talk about career options, he frustrates everyone by his unwillingness to talk about anything else at all but being a dragon trainer, so incredibly stubborn with his red hair and his freckles.

But you see, he's always known what he's been looking for. How many other children can say that?

V.

His third day in Romania, they let him close enough to smell them. There are six of them in the caves, coiled like snakes, but more beautiful in the firelight, cracking lazy eyes at him as he passes, holding his breath in respect for their power.

During all the nights in school and at home at the Burrow that he lay awake imagining this, he never considered that they would have their own unique scent. But of course they would. Everything does. But now he wonders whether or not, if he had actually thought about it, he would have come up with _this _smell and thinks that perhaps he would have.

It is an old, deep, earthy smell. It makes him think of deep caves: slightly damp, but very warm and not the least bit clammy. Sort of the smell of molten metal, like a blacksmith's smithy, like raw ore. It fills the caves to the brim with life that is unlike any he's ever experienced before, and he knows he is where he is supposed to be.

VI.

_Quidditch felt something like this_, is his only thought when he rides for the first time: zooming about through the air, the rush of adrenaline, the thrill of the close call, the freedom that only comes through flight. There was a reason that he was the greatest Quidditch player Hogwarts has ever known. He worked harder, longer, not for victory, but to push himself towards that high, to capture that elusive something that he could find only if he flew fast enough and crazy enough and high enough.

Mum was petrified the few times she saw him play, screeching and hiding her eyes behind her hands, and even Dad was a little worried. Bill shook his head and the twins were jealous and Percy told him outright that he was crazy and Ron and Ginny were too young to understand.

In a way, he is glad that they are thousands of miles away, that they cannot see him now as he shoots through the air on the back of a Fireball. His broomstick was nothing like this: there is a grace and a power and risk in dragonflight that is nothing else in the world. He realizes how little control he has, and there is something exhilarating about that. But he shares a kinship with the dragon he is riding that no one else can ever understand.

The dragon—his name is Chi Lung Wang--wants to fly faster, higher, to make dips and sudden turns and flips. He can feel its desire pulsing through the sinewy body, into his own legs. Its eagerness crackles through the air like that electricity that Dad talks about—like magic. The wind against his face, against the dragon's skin, is freedom itself. Through flight, the dragon is set free, and so is he.

VII.

The textures are as familiar as his own skin, as the rough-woven sheets he sleeps on each night, as the Burrow's kitchen table, worn almost to silk by dozens of years and hundreds of handprints and thousands of scrubbings: the scales feel like sun-baked sandstone, or the rough tiles of the roof of the Burrow when he had to patch them on a summer's day. The claws feel like an elephant's tusk, like ivory and jade, hard as nails but smooth as silk under his hands, though there is a heat that emanates even from them. The wings are like wet paper, but stronger, and he feels that if he pushes his finger into them, it will pop through on the other side, the edges of the break clinging damply to his work-roughened fingers, even though he knows this is not true, for dragon's wings are one of the strongest substances in the world and they hold aloft two tons of dragon. The snout feels pebbly, like a well-worn cobblestone street in some ancient city, with little tuffs of smoke piping up from nostrils that are so much like chimneys.

But the deepest magic, rising from the hidden depths of the world, the oldest magic in the world, is altogether different.

He slides his hand along the skin of the dragon's neck. It is thin, but strong, and he can feel the endless heat under his hand. And he is reminded of the way the crust forms over lava, black shell holding back liquid fire. The dragon is this: fire, endless and hotter and more dangerous than any other fire, the fire of the earth itself, the fire of magic, barely contained by a thin layer of skin. The deepest magic encased in a very ordinary kind of flesh.

VIII.

For the first time, he truly understands their power, quite apart from their grace and freedom. He understands the fear, why it was that, in the olden days, it was the dragonslayers that were the heroes, and not the dragonriders.

And though he has ridden a thousand times before and found life there, none of those flights had the importance of this one, the dead seriousness, the threat behind it.

The world is blood and the eerily green of Dark Marks and screams and smoke, and he cuts through it all on the back of a Horntail, one with the beast, a living weapon. And the oldest, deepest fire devours Death Eaters, and he is aware of the thin thread of control he has over this beast—if he loses sway for one moment, one of his brothers could die down there, or his former classmates, or a perfect stranger he is united to only by their common devotion to freedom and light.

And he understands all the endless, backbreaking, bone-aching days of training, the hours and hours and weeks and years that passed getting them to trust him. This is what he was working towards, and not just the joy of flight.

And the dragon is suddenly a fellow warrior, and not just a chum to seek after a thrill with. And when the victory comes, it is the dragon's as much as it is his or Harry's or anyone else's.

IX.

He finds her with the dragons, of course, as he has always known he would. But she surprises him, like a blow to the chest, leaving him breathless. This is enchantment.

Her eyes are fire and color and a gentle sort of power and somehow ancientness that only women can know and that something else that he has never found except in dreams and dragons.

She laughs and the sound is very like the flapping of wings in the morning air. Her hand slips into his, and it reminds him of the silk of the dragon's claws, with the roughness of scales that are calluses and the warmth underneath it all. She shakes shining curls out of her face, and he sees that perhaps she is not really beautiful, not in the way his brother Bill's wife is, not beautiful like a sunset or starlight or a carefully carved statue. Rather, she is the awe of the open sea during a storm, the thrill of a broomstick being the only thing holding you up as you race through the air, the contentment of a long day's work well-done and completed.

She is the warmth and fire of dragons, and he has found what he is looking for.

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